"the end of growthist economic ideology, greater efficiency, stable population size and "appropriate" technology."

There you have it; the solution is also in Michael's bleat; a return trip to the moon for such advocates as himself of this green, misanthropic vision.

To paraphrase the old saying, Go Up, young Michael, and take your Ludditism with you.

@Futurist, thanks. @michael_in_adelaide, disappointing. Explains the lack of sourcing I guess. And your latest comment, just charming. But I’ll play a straight bat and provide some more information.

Koch was instrumental at Argonne, pre the “IFR years” of 1984-94. He had much to do with the forerunner technology, the Experimental Breeder Reactor II. This established much of the knowledge for IFR, but challenges remained. The main developments in the IFR years were
1/ The demonstrated success of the metal fuel, an alloy of uranium, plutonium and zirconium.
2/ The highly successful fuel recycling (made easier with the much better new alloy fuel)
3/ Processes for managing the eventual waste stream.

It came together beautifully, especially combining the safety properties of the metal fuel with the safety properties of the sodium coolant. To quote Till “The IFR technology was one in which all the pieces fitted together, dovetailing to make each part of the system complement the rest and to make possible an entire system that could have had a truly revolutionary impact on nuclear power for the future”.

As to a raging radioactive sodium fire, it certainly is a comfy position to say “I need not suggest how it could happen, you must tell me what we would do”. For it to happen, significant amounts of non-corrosive sodium operating at very low pressure would need to escape from the two steel layers of the seismically isolated reactor vessel into an environment in which all of the heavy argon gas blanket had been somehow vacated, said environment being a containment vault that can withstand direct aircraft impact, and conversely contain anything that happens within. Don’t pretend likelihood doesn’t matter. Of course it does. If it happened, it would need to be controlled, and that would be hard. Were it not controlled, it would be contained.

To get up to speed quickly, read this interview with Charles Till http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html Though it would appear your actual issue is concern at the consequences of IFR being real. If so, perhaps comment as such, rather than making faux technical critique.

Michael,

Don't be so arrogant. I also have a license to import and handle nuclear devices, and am presently importing 10 sources for instrumentation. On top of that, while doing chemistry at University, we ran controlled fires with various elements including sodium, potassium, magnesium and aluminium. A large scale fire would require a complete rupture of the reactor vessel, the containment vessel and all the piping to spill sufficient sodium and vent the gas.

Finally the coolant has relatively low level of radioactivity, and even if it all burnt it would in no way compare to Fukushima.

P.S. There was a manned mission to the moon in '69. And there are other types of reactor that can burn waste fuel including the CANDU reactors of which 6 have been running for more than a decade, and 22 are under construction.

Thank you Ben, for your comments, and to you and Tom for your article.

The Greens are incorrigible when it comes to energy and unfortunately this current government has sold its 'soul' to this point of view.

Hopefully however, someone in Canberra may be reading and put your information into the future policy mix.

Interesting that my relatively mild bit of "abuse" can be deleted by OLO but when I pointed out to OLO that Malcolm King's fairly recent article on population issues contained outright lies nothing was done!

A contribution, if I may, from the possible home of a prototype PRISM...

Someone upthread made a comment to the effect of "why is the proposed PRISM unit only 300MWe?"

The clue is in the "M" in PRISM, which stands for "Modular" or "Module". It's part of a family of designs that are collectively called "Small Modular Reactors" or SMRs.

The concept of an SMR is basically that the more construction/assembly work can be undertaken in a factory environment, as opposed on in situ, the better. The overall concept of an SMR would have the major components factory built and tested, assembled into a small number (maybe 10-20) portable assemblies then shipped to site.

So, PRISM is designed that the main components - the reactor "vessel" (yes, I know it's a pool type, but I'm not sure waht else you'd call the main component holding the reactor internals)..., steam generators/heat exchangers and so on are rail or barge-portable.

On the downside, it obviously imposes size limits on the components, and hence indirectly on total reactor power. Hence the relatively small size of the PRISM unit (pretty much all the SMRs on the drawing boards are <300MW).

It's certainly a viable concept - I've got experience of on-site QA in plants with utterly different construction concepts, the UK's AGRs. That wasn't fun.

Will the economics work? The Jury's obviously out. Designs like the ESBWR are still very largely factory/modular built but are very much larger, and weill benefit from ecnomies of scale.